Sunday, May 23, 2010

The German-Dominated European Super State Finally Emerges

The New York Times yesterday had an op ed piece by a German, Gabor Steingart, entitled: "It Takes a Crisis to Make a Continent." The frankness of this piece is breathtaking. He admits that the EU is becoming a unified state that will involve the loss of national sovereignty and he admits that it is all happening in an anti-democratic manner.

The people have rejected the EU constitution decisively but the bureaucrats are imposing a unified, centralized state anyway under the cover of an economic crisis. Countries on the fringe are going to occupy the roughly the same position in the EU as the Eastern European states like Poland and Hungary occupied in the Soviet Empire, which also came into existence in an anti-democratic way. Greece will be ruled from Brussels (or should we say Berlin?).

BIRTHDAYS are fun; a birth itself is not. There’s a lot of screaming and groaning, and even in the easiest deliveries, there’s always the fear that something will go wrong.

The birth of a state is no less difficult. Indeed, what pessimists — including many here in Germany — see as an existential crisis for the continent is really just the latest stage in the birth pangs of a new country. While we should of course worry about Greek debt, we should also have hope that we are witnessing the end of the euro zone as an abstraction and the birth of the United States of Europe.

Europe’s movement toward unification has always been the product of crises. The catastrophes of World War I and World War II convinced the continent’s leaders to cast aside the solidity of fixed borders and with them the old nationalism and isolationism that led to repeated conflict.

And yet idealism was only a small part of the urge toward cooperation. By the early 1950s, the threat of Soviet communism loomed much larger. Common fears as much as a collective vision united us; as Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of Germany once said: “European unity was a dream of a few. It became the hope for many. Today it is a necessity for us all.”

During the cold war the European Community expanded its membership and began creating monetary relationships. Though European leaders tried to give sound economic justifications for the merger, the nascent monetary union was first and foremost a political creation, a currency knot meant to bind vastly different states to a common interest.

Crisis and opportunity were also attendant during the early 1990s, when German unification led to fears of a renewed Teutonic nationalism and a reactionary Russia. The result, after years of debate, was the creation and rapid expansion of the European Union. We also got the euro, as much a political as an economic tool. By design, the currency’s strict fiscal and monetary rules would force the stronger economies to balance out the weak, pushing them toward ever closer cooperation.

By and large, however, the European Union has stayed out of the lives of its citizens, and so these past crises have not entered so rudely into the public consciousness. That has changed with the talk of bailing out spendthrift Greece, which is perhaps why this crisis is being seen as so much more serious than those of the past.

Yet historians will likely look back to May 9 as a turning point. That is when, in a conference room in Brussels, European leaders announced a blanket guarantee of 750 million euros (about $1 trillion) for the countries on the euro zone’s southern flank. Even the European Central Bank, which until then had been regarded as an independent body, silently stepped in to bail out the troubled states. Though they would never admit it, the men and women who sat in Brussels formed the first European economic cabinet, making policy on the fly, just as in a regular state.

Read the rest here.

The totalitarian implications of this development are frightening for those who believe in democracy and freedom. In many ways, this development represents a less-violent and gentler fulfillment of Hitler's dream of a German-dominated European super-state. And, interestingly,
it is emerging 70 years exactly after the Battle of Britain. It may be that countries like Britain, which are not yet in the Euro, may be able to avoid being taken over. Then again, that will depend on how courageously David Cameron acts. But to say that he is no Churchill is the understatement of the century!

The EU is a godless empire just like the Soviet one and its goal is to prove that the good life can be had without God. This is not the goal of the people of every country, but it is the goal of the political class. This is the same political class, however, that is currently appeasing and bowing before Islam. So it may not be "godless" for long.

The whole thing may fall apart yet, especially if there is an economic depression. But then again, the crisis may allow for the emergence of dictatorship either at the continent level or at the national level. The world is changing before our eyes.

Hilliare Belloc famously said: "Europe is the Faith." But today it looks more like the emerging empire of the Antichrist.

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